Time spent against a ticket is not showing up on burn down chart in a Team Managed Jira project

Question

Hello!

I have a team-managed project where the team is logging time spent against each ticket. We are using original estimate to track the estimate on each ticket. When the worklog is updated with time spent on the ticket, I expect the red line in the burn down chart to go down, however this is not the case.  I have turned on time tracking in the project. There is a slight downturn because an issue was moved to the next sprint.

Can someone please help me understand why this is happening?

Danut M _StonikByte_ · Answer

Hi @akhilaa.susheela,

Indeed, the Jira's burndown chart drops only when the issue is moved to Done (last column of board). Apparently it does not count the amount of work logged; when the issue is marked done it drops with the amount of time set at Original Estimate. It behaves as in the case of story points, the only difference being the fact that it uses Original Estimate instead of Story Points Estimate field...

As a better alternative to this report, you could search on Atlassian Marketplace for an app that offers a burndown chart capable to consider the time spent.

If you are willing to try an app, our Great Gadgets app offers a good Sprint Burndown Chart gadget, as well as a Release Burndown Chart and Team Velocity Chart, that is capable to display the progress by any estimation type, including Time remaining & time spent, which is what you need in this case.

Have also a look over this article: Tracking an agile project that uses time estimates with Great Gadgets for Jira.

Danut.

Trudy P Claspill · Answer

The status that indicates the work is complete and no additional work remains needs to be mapped to the column farthest to the right on your board. Jira is designed so that only the work in that right-most column is considered "complete" in the sprint.

The red line will move downward only as issues are moved into the right-most column.

You determine if your team is on track to complete their work in the sprint by the work getting completed (moved to the right-most column) as the sprint progresses. If your work items are all estimated to take most or all of the sprint to complete, the sprint burndown report will not be able to show you whether or not you are on track. There is not a native burndown chart that shows you how the Time Spent is changing compared to the Original Estimate across all issues in the sprint.

If you want a burndown like that I believe you would need to look into a third party app.

You could use an Issue Filter Results gadget on a dashboard to display the Work Ratio field for each issue in the sprint. The Work Ratio field is the percentage of the Original Estimate that has been consumed by the Time Spent. However if you are changing the Remaining Estimate to increase the time remaining, the Work Ratio field will not take that into consideration, as shown for issue ATP-102 where I logged 1 hr but increased the overall time estimate by indicating there was still 2h of remaining work.

akhilaa.susheela · Answer

thanks @Trudy Claspill - then how can I estimate if my team is on track to complete their work in a sprint?

The done status on our board comes much before the last column. Example, our QA Complete column = Done status and we have a bunch of columns after the QA Complete column which all fall under the Done status.

Does this mean that our burndown will only show once the ticket is moved to the QA complete column? Meaning, the red line will begin to have a downward trend?